In the liminal season we are flowers and owl

a different story when the world is dark

Blodeuwedd — flower face, owl by A. C.

Hello friends, familiar and new, and welcome to a house in a hamlet in a forest. I’m Jan and I hold spaces for those on journeys of transformation. I believe story is powerful and that the earth offers healing through our daily connection and herbal allies. My Sunday posts are always free and you are so welcome here. Let’s create a little alchemy together.

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At the end of October I began writing a new herbal course on the liminal season that is beyond and pervades all other seasons, herbs of ritual and inner journeys, herbs of transformation. Herbs of the story we want to become…

Over and over I hear people ask how we best live in this increasingly bewildering world.

The world is dark this winter, but the forest has been bright. November hosted the most exquisite autumn I can remember — days of pale clear sky, the bleached blue that haloes the sun. The colours exquisite — oaks dressed in flashes of carnelian, in sepia paper, brittling to the ground, birches flutter ripe gambage and amber in striating light, beeches clinging to their leaves — raw sienna and auburn, a single lemon flame of larch, while hawthorn flaunted leaves of many colours — carmine edged in lime, golden syrup, cinnamon-mottled, and elders tendered coral, vermillion, rust…

In the dark world genocide continues, women’s bodily autonomy is threatened, along with trans folks’ basic human rights, refugees and immigrants are refused safe haven...

All that we get to choose is how we face what is coming,

writes herbalist Seán Pádraig O’Donoghue.

The fragile, breath-taking beauty of this world is under siege —waters are poisoned or stolen, species disappear, children die alone under the rubble of their bomb homes, places of safety become tombs. Yet still the forest puts on its beauty in the face of winter’s cyclic death before new life. Still whales lullaby oceans. Still owls serenade the moon.

James Baldwin calls artists to remember that no society is stable, but the immensity of a new story lies on the other side of this. Hermann Hesse, writing in Steppenwolf, talks of civilisations on the cusp of such elemental transition that our ability to see what comes next is occluded, but there is a ‘next’. Toni Morrison insists that this is exactly the moment when artists and writers must do their work. And, writing in The Rebel, Camus asserts that what matters is love, of the earth, of everyone who lives under the same sky, what matters is not what we exclude but what we include.

What can we do in this complex world? I can only believe, with Hannah Arendt and so many writers, artists, herbalists, lovers of the earth, that:

The smallest act in the most limited circumstances, bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.

The Human Condition

There is a story from Welsh mythology of a girl made from flowers by Math and Gwydion to be a wife for Llew, who is born after rape and cursed by his mother never to marry a human wife. With Blodeuwedd as his wife, Llew is able to rule. She is the Empress of the tarot, the sovreignty of the land, the world in bloom. And who can take the earth against her will?

Blodeuwedd falls in love with Gronw, but Llew will never release her and so the lovers plot to kill Llew. The problem is that Llew cannot be killed either outdoors or in, not on horse nor on foot, and only with a spearhead cast during a sacred period of time. So Gronw spends a year and a day making the spearhead in this period of sacred time, while Blodeuwedd persuades Llew to demonstrate how difficult it would be to kill him.

Llew prepares a bath at the side of the river, has a thatched roof erected over it and stands in the bathwater—neither inside nor out… He clambers onto the edge of the bath, then reaches one foot out and rests it on the back of a goat, waiting in position. Neither on horse nor on foot, he tells Blodeuwedd and, as he is speaking, Gronw’s arrow flies towards him and lodges in his side.

Dead! But is he? The slumped body rises, an injured eagle, bleeding, but able to take flight. Math (Llew’s father) and Gwydion (Math’s uncle) search for Llew and treat his wounds, bring him back to his human form. And then they search for the lovers and when they find them Gronw is killed, but Blodeuwedd they transform into an owl, a bird of night and death.

In the land where Blodeuwedd was made, her name means both 'flower face' and 'owl'. She wanted to be flowers, but not to be owned. She wanted to be flowers — oak and nettle, primrose, bean, broom, meadowsweet, burdock, chestnut and hawthorn — but they made her an owl.

In my writing room I have a picture of Blodeuwedd on my wall. It's by the artist Pat Gregory, an image done for the poetry collection where the air is rarefied, by Susan Richardson. In it, Blodeuwedd is a young woman in a red dress, gazing into a mirror. An owl, its talons and eyes petals amongst its feathers, gazes back. And around the border the legend: ‘I’m still here.’

She wants to be flowers, as do I — in my writing, in my encounters with the world, human and more than human — tender, open, offering... And yet she chose love, freedom, risk, allowed the possibility of death or transformation for the sake of a different story about life. Flowers or owl, I realise as I stand on the cusp of elderhood, is a false dichotomy. The owl too tenders the world, mothers and sings, lullabies her chicks, soft feathers a nest, but she knows also she will need her talons, her wings.

Not all darkness is overwhelm and horror. Not all darkness is to be eschewed. The safe, dark cave provides shelter, has its fire that protects, invites stories to be shared, flickers light into the dark. The rich dark earth is brimming with fertility. The darker winter months invite us to rest and restore… It is not light or dark, flowers or owl, our own survival or the survival of others far away, self-compassion or radical generosity. There is a more expansive, deeper, richer song that calls into the night and can blossom in the sun. A song that refuses false choices.

I’m still here — ageing in a strange and uncertain world, juggling too much work, an autoimmune condition, implicated by the political insanities of the time we live in... yet able to make small decisions that, no matter how tiny, ripple into different stories.

We are still here, we persist, there is always the hope of a different story.

It’s a great way to get to know how my herbal courses as well as giving you full access to all my offerings here on Substack:

regular live workshops (quarterly around the time of the Celtic lunar festivals) for paid subscribers to gather with prompts, inspiration and discussion

an invitation to join me at my kitchen table for a monthly 90 minutes of writing by candlelight around the time of the dark moon, with an opening piece of inspiration, an optional prompt, a quiet space to write and a final word of inspiration (beginning in the new year)

discounts on herbal courses, one-to-one herbal check-ins and my annual kith writer’s community

Plus an archive of writing resources to explore.